The Paradise Mystery eBook

Mary rather liked Mr. Folliot. He was a big,
half-asleep sort of man, who had few words and could
talk about little else than his hobby. But he
was a passionate lover of flowers and plants, and
had a positive genius for rose-culture, and was at
all times highly delighted to take flower-lovers round
his garden. She turned at once and walked in,
and Folliot led her away down the scented paths.

“It’s an experiment I’ve been trying,”
he said, leading her up to a cluster of blooms of
a colour and size which she had never seen before.
“What do you think of the results?”

“Magnificent!” exclaimed Mary. “I
never saw anything so fine!”

“No!” agreed Folliot, with a quiet chuckle.
“Nor anybody else—­because there’s
no such rose in England. I shall have to go
to some of these learned parsons in the Close to invent
me a Latin name for this—­it’s the
result of careful experiments in grafting—­took
me three years to get at it. And see how it blooms,—­scores
on one standard.”

He pulled out a knife and began to select a handful
of the finest blooms, which he presently pressed into
Mary’s hand.

“By the by,” he remarked as she thanked
him and they turned away along the path, “I
wanted to have a word with you—­or with
Ransford. Do you know—­does he know—­that
that confounded silly woman who lives near to your
house—­Mrs. Deramore—­has been
saying some things—­or a thing—­which—­to
put it plainly—­might make some unpleasantness
for him?”

Mary kept a firm hand on her wits—­and gave
him an answer which was true enough, so far as she
was aware.

“I’m sure he knows nothing,” she
said. “What is it, Mr. Folliot?”

“Why, you know what happened last week,”
continued Folliot, glancing knowingly at her.
“The accident to that stranger. This Mrs.
Deramore, who’s nothing but an old chatterer,
has been saying, here and there, that it’s a
very queer thing Dr. Ransford doesn’t know anything
about him, and can’t say anything, for she herself,
she says, saw the very man going away from Dr. Ransford’s
house not so long before the accident.”

“I am not aware that he ever called at Dr. Ransford’s,”
said Mary. “I never saw him—­and
I was in the garden, about that very time, with your
stepson, Mr. Folliot.”

“So Sackville told me,” remarked Folliot.
“He was present —­and so was I—­when
Mrs. Deramore was tattling about it in our house yesterday.
He said, then, that he’d never seen the man
go to your house. You never heard your servants
make any remark about it?”

“Never!” answered Mary.

“I told Mrs. Deramore she’d far better
hold her tongue,” continued Folliot. “Tittle-tattle
of that sort is apt to lead to unpleasantness.
And when it came to it, it turned out that all she
had seen was this stranger strolling across the Close
as if he’d just left your house. If—­there’s
always some if! But I’ll tell you why I
mentioned it to you,” he continued, nudging